A Plexible Pi

If, like me, you've jumped onto the Plex bandwagon with both feet,
you've probably discovered how difficult it is to make a standalone Plex
player. Sure, you can install an entire OS, then auto-start the Plex
program in full screen, but it's not as simple as installing the XBMC
distro, or even OpenELEC. If you own a Raspberry Pi, that has all changed.

RasPlex is a custom Linux distribution based on the popular (and awesome)
OpenELEC Raspberry Pi port. Rather than installing XBMC on an RPi,
however, RasPlex installs the Plex Home Theater application. Granted,
the Raspberry Pi does struggle with menu speed in Plex until the cache
of thumbnails is built, but with a developer focusing strictly on making
Plex work for the RPi, those caching issues will be solved soon!

If you have Plex on your phone, tablet, computer, browser and Roku,
but really wish you could make a standalone Plex Home Theater with your
Raspberry Pi, check out RasPlex today: http://www.rasplex.com.

______________________

Shawn Powers is a Linux Journal Associate Editor. You might find him on IRC, Twitter, or training IT pros at CBT Nuggets.

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Clarification; RasPlex is not Plex Home Theater, and does not use any code from Plex Home Theater. RasPlex is open source just as the XBMC source code which it is based on, while Plex Home Theater is closed source and share no code with RasPlex.

RasPlex is an Linux-based OS distribution designed specifically made for and solely optimized for Raspberry Pi, and comes with a forked version XBMC with the look and feel of Plex Home Theater as it is primarily designed to be a third-party client for Plex Media Server, even though it can act like a stand-alone media player too.

So it should be noted here that RasPlex is actually a fork of XBMC, and not a fork of Plex Home Theater even though it have its look and feel.

ACTUAL clarification from the creator, lead developer, and maintainer of RasPlex:

RasPlex is built on top OpenELEC (the first thing you see when you boot is a splash screen, saying basically this to provide credit to the great work sraue is doing), which is Open Embeded Linux Entertainment Console - it's just an embedded linux distro that payloads only one thing - usually XBMC. In the case of RasPlex, we replace XBMC with PlexHT. PlexHT is very related to XBMC, and is essentially just a fork of Frodo with some added plexisms.

There is basically nothing picked from raspbmc in rasplex itself, i don't know where that information came from but it is completely false.

The goal of rasplex is to be PlexHT + OpenELEC, with as little glue as possible to make that happen. PlexHT is open source, and actively developed by Plex employees.

A common source of confusion is that people think that RasPlex is the plex media server for raspberry pi. This is false, RasPlex is PlexHT which is the media *client*.

ACTUAL clarification from the creator, lead developer, and maintainer of RasPlex:

RasPlex is built on top OpenELEC (the first thing you see when you boot is a splash screen, saying basically this to provide credit to the great work sraue is doing), which is Open Embeded Linux Entertainment Console - it's just an embedded linux distro that payloads only one thing - usually XBMC. In the case of RasPlex, we replace XBMC with PlexHT. PlexHT is very related to XBMC, and is essentially just a fork of Frodo with some added plexisms.

There is basically nothing picked from raspbmc in rasplex itself, i don't know where that information came from but it is completely false.

The goal of rasplex is to be PlexHT + OpenELEC, with as little glue as possible to make that happen. PlexHT is open source, and actively developed by Plex employees.

A common source of confusion is that people think that RasPlex is the plex media server for raspberry pi. This is false, RasPlex is PlexHT which is the media *client*.

Clarification; RasPlex is not Plex Home Theater, and does not use any code from Plex Home Theater. RasPlex is open source just as the XBMC source code which it is based on, while Plex Home Theater is closed source and share no code with RasPlex.

RasPlex is an Linux-based OS distribution designed specifically made for and solely optimized for Raspberry Pi, and comes with a forked version XBMC with the look and feel of Plex Home Theater as it is primarily designed to be a third-party client for Plex Media Server, even though it can act like a stand-alone media player too.

So it should be noted here that RasPlex is actually a fork of XBMC, and not a fork of Plex Home Theater even though it have its look and feel.